Fated to the Mountain Alpha (Blackridge Pack #2)

1. Chapter 1

The Montana border crossing had been easier than expected. No checkpoints, no guards. Just a rusted cattle gate hanging open in the snow and a weathered sign reading PRIVATE PROPERTY in letters barely visible under years of grime.

Sage drove past it without slowing.

Her truck’s headlights carved tunnels through falling snow, illuminating nothing but white and the occasional dark shape of a pine bowing under the weight of accumulation.

Her knuckles ached where they gripped the wheel.

The heater rattled, fighting a losing battle against the cold seeping through the door seals.

She’d crossed into Blackridge Pack territory twenty minutes ago. Her phone had lost signal shortly after. The weather reports warned the storm would get worse before it got better.

Sage had driven through worse.

The cabin appeared like a ghost materializing from the white. Single story, timber construction, windows dark. She pulled the truck around back where the tree line would hide it from the main road, killed the engine, and sat in the sudden silence.

Snow hit the windshield in soft thuds. The wind howled.

She reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the photograph she’d looked at so many times the edges had gone soft. Her brother smiled at her from a summer day three years back, his arm around her shoulders, both of them squinting into the sun at some barbecue she could barely remember.

The second photograph lay beneath it. She didn’t look at that one. Didn’t need to. She’d memorized every detail of what they’d done to him.

Sage tucked both photos back into the glove compartment, zipped her jacket to her throat, and stepped out into the storm.

The cold slammed into her. She pulled her hood up and moved quickly to the cabin’s back door, boots sinking into snow that already reached mid-calf.

The lock was old. The pick gun she’d bought off a retired locksmith in Billings made quick work of it.

Inside, the cabin smelled like dust and pine and something else. Something wild that raised the hair on the back of her neck. She closed the door behind her, locked it, and stood in the darkness letting her eyes adjust.

Small space. One main room serving as kitchen and living area, a door that probably led to a bedroom, another to a bathroom. Furniture under sheets. No electricity. She’d expected that.

The windows were intact, the roof looked solid, and most importantly, it was far enough from the main pack compound that she could set up surveillance without being detected. Probably.

She swept the flashlight across the space. Dust motes danced in the beam. Everything looked abandoned, but that wild smell lingered, raising instincts she’d learned to trust. Someone had been here recently enough that their scent remained.

She moved through the cabin quickly, checking the bedroom and bathroom, confirming she was alone. Then she went back to the truck for her equipment.

Three trips through the deepening snow to haul everything in. The storm would keep her here at least two days. Long enough to start the real work.

Long enough for the pack to realize someone had crossed their border.

She pulled up the map she’d built over three years. Six deaths. No convictions. And a pattern every authority had ignored.

Six bodies, all within a hundred-mile radius of Blackridge territory. All with the same signature mutilation. All dismissed as animal attacks by authorities who either didn’t know better or didn’t want to.

Her brother had been the first.

Then she clicked open the file labeled CROSS, DECLAN on the screen and looked at the grainy photograph she’d taken from half a mile away.

He’d been standing outside the pack’s main lodge, talking to another man.

Even through the telephoto lens, something about him made her hands go unsteady.

Not fear. She’d burned through fear somewhere around year two.

Something else. Something that felt like recognition, which made no sense because she’d never seen him before that moment.

She’d closed the file and told herself it was the adrenaline.

Dark hair. Tall frame. The kind of stillness that suggested violence held in check.

She’d researched him as thoroughly as she’d researched the rest of them. Declan Cross, thirty-two. Part of Blackridge Pack’s leadership based on her surveillance. No criminal record. By all accounts, he ran a tight operation. His pack stayed out of trouble, paid their taxes, kept to themselves.

But someone in his pack had killed Mason. Someone in his pack was still killing.

And either Declan Cross was covering for them, or he was too blind to see what was happening in his own territory.

Sage closed the laptop and stood, her body protesting the hours spent driving. She moved to the window and looked out at the snow. The snow fell so thick she couldn’t see more than a few feet. The truck had already disappeared under a white blanket.

Good. The weather would hide her presence, give her time to think.

Movement.

She froze, her hand reaching for the knife at her belt.

Something had moved out there. Not the wind-blown shifting of snow-laden branches. Something deliberate. Something large.

Sage killed the flashlight and pressed herself against the wall beside the window, pulse hammering in her throat. She’d known this was a risk. Known that crossing pack territory in that weather was dangerous, that breaking into a cabin was asking to be caught.

She’d done it anyway.

The movement came again, closer this time. A dark shape separating itself from the white, heading straight for the cabin.

Not human-shaped.

Her breath snagged. She’d seen wolves before. Regular wolves, the kind that lived in the mountains and avoided people. This was bigger. Much bigger. And it was not avoiding her.

The shape paused at the tree line. Even through the white, she could feel it looking at the cabin. Looking at her, though there was no way it could see her in the darkened interior.

Then it moved again, and this time it was definitely coming toward the back door.

Sage’s mind worked through options. Fight. She had the knife, had the gun in her bag, but shooting a shifter would bring the whole pack down on her. Run. Impossible in this storm, and she’d never outrun a wolf. Hide. Where? The cabin had maybe three hundred square feet.

The footsteps on the back porch were human.

She pressed harder against the wall, knife gripped in her right hand, and tried to control her breathing. Tried to think like the investigator she’d trained herself to be instead of the terrified woman she’d been before.

The door handle turned.

She’d locked it. She knew she’d locked it.

The lock clicked open anyway.

The door swung inward, bringing a gust of wind and snow and that wild scent, stronger now, with something beneath it she had no category for. It moved through her chest like a word in a language she’d never learned but somehow almost understood.

Her grip on the knife tightened. She didn’t trust things she couldn’t name.

A man’s silhouette filled the doorway, broad-shouldered and tall, snow dusting his dark hair. He stepped inside and went completely still.

The quiet was different from before. Not the stillness of a predator assessing.

Something else moved through him, visible in the half-second before he controlled it, a tension that ran from his shoulders down through his hands and then disappeared, locked away behind a face that gave her absolutely nothing.

She didn’t know what she’d just watched happen to him. She knew it had been significant.

“You can come out.” His voice was low, steadier than it had any right to be. He picked up a pair of sweatpants from the shelf by the door and pulled them on. “I know you’re there.”

She didn’t move.

“I’m not going to hurt you.” He stayed exactly where he was, hands loose at his sides. “But you’re in my cabin, and I’d like to know why.”

His deliberate quiet made her pulse do something inconvenient. She catalogued it as adrenaline and moved on.

“I can hear your heartbeat,” he continued, his tone careful, choosing each word for a reason she couldn’t see. “I can smell your fear. You’re armed. Knife, probably, based on the way you’re holding your breath. You shouldn’t be here.”

She stepped away from the wall. “Neither should you. Not in that form.”

He turned, and the amber glow of his eyes in the darkness hit her like a physical thing.

She’d known about the eyes. She’d read about the eyes.

Knowing and seeing were not the same, and for one unguarded moment something in her chest caught, and it had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with something she refused to examine.

She examined the knife grip instead. It was fine.

“I’m not in any form but my own.” He stayed by the door, hands loose at his sides. “You broke into my property during a blizzard. I’m well within my rights to defend it.”

“Then why haven’t you?”

He turned his head to her then. Really looked, the way she’d learned to look at people, reading the set of his mouth, the hands, the space between words. Whatever he found made something shift almost imperceptibly in his face, there and gone before she could catch it.

“I’m trying to figure out what you’re doing here.”

A small, controlled sniff. His jaw worked once, quiet and deep. She didn’t have a name for it and didn’t want one.

“The truck hidden behind the cabin suggests planning. The surveillance equipment on the table suggests purpose. But crossing this territory alone, during a storm, breaking into a building.” He tilted his head. “That suggests something worth dying for.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Someone passing through.”

“Try again.” His voice stayed absolutely level, and that steadiness was doing something irritating to her concentration.

“Someone who got caught in the storm and needed shelter.”

“Once more.” He took a single step forward, and she registered the instinct to step back and overrode it. She wasn’t going to step back.

“And don’t insult either of us with another lie.”

“Sage Whitmore.” She squared her shoulders. “I’m investigating a series of murders.”

His face went rigid. “Murders.”

“Six people. All killed the same way. All within a hundred miles of your pack’s territory.”

“My pack.” His eyes didn’t leave her face. “You’re certain it’s a pack?”

“I’m certain you know exactly what you are.” She held his eyes. “So let’s skip the part where you pretend otherwise.”

A muscle moved in his jaw. She had the unsettling impression she’d almost surprised him.

“And you think my pack is responsible for these six deaths.”

It wasn’t a question, but she answered anyway. “I know they are.”

The temperature in the room seemed to drop. He went very still, different from his earlier hold, not controlled, just absolute, like something had pulled all the air out of him at once.

“You know?” he repeated quietly.

“My brother was the first.” Her voice stayed steady. It always stayed steady when she talked about this. She’d practiced until she could keep them clean, empty of the rage that lived underneath.

She kept her eyes on his face and watched it land on him. Something moved through his features that she hadn’t expected. Not guilt. Not calculation. Something that looked, briefly and impossibly, like recognition of a specific kind of pain.

“They found him in pieces on a logging road two miles from your border. The police called it an animal attack. Closed the case in a week.”

“And you don’t believe them.”

“I know what an animal attack looks like. I’ve read the reports. All of them.” She didn’t look away. “This wasn’t an animal. This was something else. Something that wanted him to suffer.”

A moment of quiet followed, longer than the words required. When he replied, something had drained from his voice.

“My name is Declan Cross. I’m inner circle in Blackridge Pack. And I’m telling you that no one under my authority killed your brother.”

“Then you’re either lying or blind.”

“Neither.” The word landed hard and dead.

“Someone in your pack—”

“No.” He closed the distance by two steps. She didn’t retreat. The scent of him hit her again at this range, that same nameless thing underneath the pine and cold. Her chin came up. She kept her face neutral. “You’re wrong.”

“I have evidence—”

“Then show me.”

She blinked. She hadn’t expected that.

“Show me your evidence.” He walked to the table where her laptop sat closed.

The length of the room opened between them and she registered, with irritation, that it was easier to think with him over there.

“You’ve been investigating. You’ve compiled files, taken photographs, built a case. Show me what you have.”

It was a trap. Had to be a trap. He’d look at her research, identify her sources, shut everything down before it started.

But he stood there waiting, and nothing about his posture suggested performance. He meant it, and she didn’t know what to do with a wolf who meant it.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because if someone in my pack is killing humans, I need to know.” He looked at her across the room. “And because you broke into my cabin during a blizzard with grief driving you, which means you’re not leaving until I give you a reason to.”

“You could make me leave.”

“I could.” He didn’t move. “But I won’t.”

No one spoke. She ran the calculation again, trap, leverage, exposure, risk, and arrived at the same place she’d been arriving at since he walked through that door. That something shifted. That this was not going the way she’d planned.

That she hadn’t been expecting him to be him.

She crossed to the table and opened her laptop.